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Blade Runner movie poster
en.wikipedia.org |
Hello Everyone:
I want share with you some thoughts I had yesterday evening watching the film Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott director). One of the things about being finished with school is that I have more time to read the books and watch the movies that I didn't have time for as a student. Blade Runner was one of the movies. The film is based Philip K. Dick's 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and is centered around police officer Rick Deckard assignment to "retire" four android slaves who have escaped their off-world colony. The story takes place in 2019, the not too distant future, presenting the City of Los Angeles as this dark, damp, dystopia that has apparently been taking over by a Japanese corporation. I'm going I chalk that one up to the zeitgeist of the early eighties. I read the book along time ago and in the wake of my post on Christopher Hawthorne's article on the movie Her, I found myself thinking about he movie. As circumstance would have it, I checked out Blade Runner from the library and made a point to watch it. It was fascinating to see the author's vision of L.A brought to life.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? book cover
dclibrary.org |
Philip K. Dick wrote the story at time of great social upheavel. The year 1968 saw the escalation of Amemrican involvement in the Viet Nam War, it was one past the "Summer of Love," one year before Woodstock and the Manson Family. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of great political, social, and cultural turmoil and the imagery in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep evokes that sense of chaos and darkness. Los Angeles has always been portrayed as this sunny Mediterranean paradise populated by happy healthy people. The Los Angeles of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a grim place taken over by a corporation that makes life-like androids that have infiltrated society at-large. It was fascinating to see how this darkness and chaos reflected the lure an experience of the sixties. Joan Didion, a keen observer of the social history of this tumultuous period, assembled her thoughts on the period in her essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. In her book, Ms. Didion writes, " The center was not holding...It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children an abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four letter words the scrawled." How strangely familiar this sounds.
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem book cover
en.wikipedia.org |
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Ms. Didion's book The White Album, released eleven years later, provide a cultural baseline for the sixties and seventies, the period that provided Philip K. Dick with his dystopic view of Los Angeles. Ms. Didion tapped into hers and society's own anxieties and discomforts. The urban cultural landscape of sixties and seventies America was a place awash in excess and full of uncertainty. While the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem engage this sense of discomfort making its way through popular culture, Philip K. Dick uses that discomfort and anxiety as a projection into the very near (for us) future. This sense of unease was played out in the music and films of the period. The protests on the streets and the nightly images of war splattered across televisions became thematic elements for movies such as Easy Rider (1969), a road movie that addressed the larger societal landscape and zeitgeist of the period. In Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick projects that uneasiness into a post-apocalyptic world controlled by a giant corporation. The late sixties through the seventies were a period of anxiety and discomfort. Perhaps, the book planted the seeds for what British music critic Simon Reynolds calls "retromania." Yet, the film Her gives us a different vision of the urban landscape.
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A scene from the movie Her
engadget.com |
Whereas Ridley Scott's Blade Runner gives us a post-apocalyptic urban landscape controlled by the Nexus Corporation, director Spike Jonze gives us a city that exists in a state of in between. It's neither the dystopia of Blade Runner or the bright shiny future that could only exist in the minds of Disney. The Los Angeles of Her is the mediator between the private auto-centric past and the public more connected future. Like Blade Runner, Her reflects the zeitgeist of its period. Instead of being a stage for social and political protests, the urban environment becomes the stage for reconciling the past and future. The Los Angeles of Her is a dense high-rise filled place with a network of mass transit. The protagonist, Theodore Twombly is the audience's representative for the isolated individual who can only connect through the digital universe. Theodore Twombly is also caught in a state of in-between. On the one hand, encouraged by the operating system "Samantha," he begins a tenuous relationship with his co-worker Amy. On the other hand, he feels more connected to "Samantha." Theodore sees her in anthropomorphic terms.
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Pudong, Shanghai, China
scmp.com |
Like Theodore, the city plays the role of the mediator. The urban landscape chosen by the director and his production designer K.K. Barrett is actually a combination of two places, the Pudong district in Shanghai, China and Los Angeles. The choice of Shanghai is a fascinating one because it is a city steeped both in the past and future. A city rich in history, yet looking forward to the future. The Pudong district is the stand-in of a Los Angeles, also a city rich in history, of the the future. Pudong supposes what Los Angeles could be if plans for future development come to fruition. A city with great mass transit, densely populated, the skyline dotted with high-rises. Spike Jonze's vision of Los Angeles reflects the push-pull of the digital age. As we become more urbanized, our sense of loneliness increases. We are disconnected from our friends and families. So we turn to the computer-the social media sites or in Theodore Twombly case, an operating system which acts as our surrogate human connection.
Both Blade Runner and Her give the audience starkly different visions of the not to distant future. More importantly, they mirror the anxieties and discomforts of the period. Blade Runner is emblematic of a society upended by social and political protests while Her represents the mediation between the past and future. The city of Her is a place stuck in neutral, trying to figure out which way forward. The city of Blade Runner is a vision of a future shaped by dark sinister corporate forces. Now that I think about it, could Philip K. Dick have been right?
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